IT- The curse of Cairnholm island
by Yuna McHill
Summary: After the little Claire Densmore ends up dead after playing with her paper boat in a rainstorm, Claire's grief-stricken brother Jake vows to find her killer. Little does he know that Claire's murderer is no simple man and that it's only the beginning of something terrifying. Can he and six other children find it in themselves to face their greatest fears together?


**IT – The curse of Cairnholm island**

As I've told you in the announcement, I'm working on this crazy crossover between IT and Miss Peregrine. I've already presented you the characters, so now I'll tell you a bit more about the changes I've made to the story to fit.

First of all, Cairnholm is said to be pretty small and 'antiquated'. I've made it a bit bigger and more professionally equiped, with a hospital, electricity and of course a sewer system, to be more like Derry.

Second, the children will not be family like in the Miss Peregrine universe, but will gradually meet as friends. Miss P will not be their mentor, but taking the role of the Big Good and supervise them from time to time.

It also has to be noted that I've changed some of the names and lines to make it original, while still trying to orientate myself on Stephen King's writing style. The original works belong to Stephen King and Ransom Riggs.

Ok, I think now you know everything you have to. So, without further ado, let's begin the peculiar journey of the peculiar Lucky Seven.

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Prologue: The death of Claire Densmore The day Claire Densomore, youngest to the Densmore-Portman family, died was a rainy one. Not rainy like the occasional cold showers that bathed the island of Cairnholm and the town, no. It was as if the Heavens in person had been disemboweled and were now emptying everything onto the earth below. The rain was pouring constantly onto the houses and streets, flooding the sewer system and thus turning the pavement into a literal river. The temperature was dropping a couple of grades lower with every hour that passed. And yet... Little Claire, how she was lovingly called by her family, was sitting on the window sill of her room and was bored. She'd love to go and play outside in the rain, but no one had time for her. Her mother was playing "Für Elise" on the big piano in the salon, her father was at the beach helping Officer Bekhmanatov to fill sand into sacks, hoping that these 'barricades' would act as a wall against the water masses, and her brother Jake was confined to bed, having fallen ill with a heavy flu. Suddenly, Claire's cornflower-blue eyes lit up with an idea. She quickly grabbed paper and her book about handicrafts and went to Jake's room. Jake Portman still looked miserable, but considerably better than the last few days, where he had almost been to the point of hallucinating from the fever. His cheeks were still red and sweaty, but he looked up with sharp greyish-blue eyes. "Oh, hey, Claire. Don't come too close, you might get infected as well.", he greeted her, his voice still hoarse from all the coughing. "Jake, can you make me a paper boat, please? I want to play outside. Pleeeaaaase, can you?", the girl asked and fluttered her eyelashes while giving him her best puppy eyes. Her older brother smiled. She was just so funny when she tried to convince others... "Oh well, I've got nothing better to do anyway, so just give it here.", he sighed. After some fruitless attempts, he triumphantly held up the finished paper boat. "Jake, you're the best!", Claire squealed happily. "It's not ready yet. Do you want your boat to sink or what? It needs to be made water- proof. But I will need a couple of things for it. The paraffin wax, a candle and a bowl. Could you fetch those? Bowls are in the kitchen, the candles are in the living room and the paraffin's in the basement.", Jake stopped and instructed her. The smile suddenly vanished from Claire's face. Why did it have to be the basement? But she only muttered "Ok, big bro." and went down the stairs. She grabbed a cereal bowl from the cupboard and pushed open the drawer holding the candles very slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. As much as she tried to dawdle though, sooner or later she ended up staring at the door to the basement with frightened big eyes, her teddy bear pressed close to her chest. The basement... The place where the monster from her nightmares lurked, just waiting for her to step into its realm to grab her and drag her off to the rotting pitch black darkness. Little Claire gulped. Perhaps it hadn't been a good idea to ask Jake for a paper boat. They could have just sat together and he would tell her grandpa Abe's stories... "Hey, what's the matter, sis? Got lost down there? The basement ain't that big, you know!", she then heard her brother's voice from above. "It's ok, Claire.", she told herself, taking a deep breath, "Just open the door and turn on the light. There is no monster..." She quickly yanked open the door and fumbled for the light switch. But just as she had pulled it upwards... "Damn it!", she quietly hissed, voice high with panic, "The electricity's fried!" Yes, the storm had cut off all the power, leaving Claire to stare into a dark pit, barely illuminated by the natural light coming from the living room. The little blonde gulped. "Jake? Where exactly is the wax?", she called up, trying to keep her voice indifferent. "It's at the left side of the stairs, next to the box where mom keeps her sewing stuff!", Jake answered. Claire couldn't see it from there, but she knew where it was located. "Ok, just run to the box, grab the wax and run back up. It can't be so hard... Now, do it!", the little girl mouthed to herself. Then her legs moved forward and she sped down the stairs into the darkness, screaming internally. Soon she reached the bottom and was standing on the cold ground of the basement. Whimpering in a panic, she groped around. Her fingertips suddenly brushed the sewing box of her mother and traced over the mid-relief of the falcon on top of the lid. Inexplicably, she felt her racing heart calm down and almost felt as if the room got brighter. It still was dark, but not a frightening darkness. It was like standing in space, surrounded by millions of little stars, not enough to make it bright, but still... And if she closed her eyes and pretended, she could almost feel wings wrapping around her shoulders and eyes watching over her head. As if the falcon would protect her... But then her other hand closed around the wax and everything returned, the paper boat, the darkness and the hungry monster. Giving a little shriek, Claire let go of the falcon and ran up to the living room again, slamming the door shut with a loud THUD!. With a heaving chest and trembling fingers she entered her brother's room, dropping the wax, candle and the bowl on his nightstand. Jake laughed quietly: "Calm down, sis. Did you see a monster down there or what? Was your escape so close? Could he bite you? Like here? Or here? Or what about here?" At every question, the boy jabbed Claire playfully. "Stop it, Jake! Leave it be!", she squeaked, laughing as well. The siblings always played jokes on and threw innocent insults at each other, but no one took it seriously. "So, first I'm going to heat up a bit of the paraffin with the candle in the bowl...", Jake explained. He knew Claire loved it when he taught her how to do things. When all the wax was a slightly transparent goo, Jake carefully dipped a finger into the hot substance. He grimaced at the heat biting into his skin, then shrugged it off and began to apply it on the whole surface of the paper boat. Claire was glad to help him once the wax was a little cooler. After the hardened paraffin covered the toy with a shiny coat, her brother reached for a marker on his desk and mumbling "Just the finishing touch...", he wrote 'SS Claire' on one side of the boat, adorned with a little crown at the end. "There. She's all ready, captain.", he proudly presented his work to Claire. Grinning from ear to ear, positively glowing, the little girl took the boat from him. For her, it seemed like the most precious and beautiful gift in the world. Because her brother had made it. "Thank you, Jake!", she told him and suddenly gave in to the overwhelming urge to give him a hug. That was followed by a quick kiss on his feverish red cheek. "Yuck!", the boy exclaimed, "Now you have my germs all over you, you bird-brain! It's your fault if you get sick now, Little Claire, I'm just saying... Now go outside and play, but don't forget to put on your raincoat or mom will go nuts." "I wish you could come with me. It's your boat after all...", his sister admitted with a small frown on her face. "No, sweetie, you know I can't. I'd only get sick again. But I promise we'll go fly a kite together when the weather clears up." , Jake smiled gently. Chuckling again, Claire ran into her room to change and Jake barely had time to lay his head on his pillow when she brushed past his door again. And suddenly, he felt terror boiling up in his gut, as if something horrible was going to happen without it being in his might to prevent it and he rose again, crying out: "Claire, wait!" Her golden locked head peeked in and she asked, worried by her brother's very pale and frightened face: "What is it, Jake?" "P-p-please take c-c-care of yourself. I-I love you.", he whispered. Both were taken aback by the heavy stutter that all of a sudden displayed itself. When the boy had been young, at the age of three, he had broken his jaw during an accident. After that he had needed intensive speech therapy to recover his ability to speak freely. "Of course I will.", Claire smiled gently, after overcoming the nervousness about her brother's well-being. "I love you too." Then she went out onto the streets at last. Jake never saw her again. The wind outside was chilly and Claire was glad that she had a thick sweater and two pairs of leggings under her bubblegum pink - she always referred to it as princess pink though - raincoat and her rubber boots of the same colour. She carefully covered her golden locks with the hood of the jacket and started to look around for a place where her "SS Claire" should start her maiden voyage. She decided on a thick stream of water near their house. "Anchors away and full speed ahead!", the child exclaimed as she launched her boat. And speed it had. Only seconds after it had hit the water, the toy was already a mile away, going downtown towards the junction of Witchhorn and Jordan Street. Claire was running beside her new toy, laughing. She pictured how it would be if she and her boat could run forever, out of Cairnholm, across the sea, beyond the sea. How many adventures she could have... They could meet other princesses with other paper boats in far away countries, engage pirates in daring swordfights... BANG! A sudden sharp pain on her forehead ripped Claire from her little daydream. She had collided with a street barrier in front of her, knocking her to the ground. The girl tried to sit up, still dizzy and in pain, when she saw her beloved boat drifting dangerously fast towards a stormdrain! It had been caught in the current of water being sucked into the sewer. "No, no, no, no, NO! Don't go in there!", she cried out, coming to her feet and trying to reach it before it went down, but she was too late. Just as she was grasping it, the boat fell down into the dark hole in front of her. "No...", she sighed sadly and, without really thinking about what she was doing, she knelt herself down in the curb swollen with water, trying to see if her gift had maybe gotten stuck somewhere. Well, any other child would have wiped their tears and run home to make another. It was a normal paper boat after all, not something irreplaceable like the Queen's jewels. But not Claire. Because her brother had made it just for her, with all his love. The toy wasn't just a nameless handicraft made of newspaper, no. It bore her name on the side and it had been sealed by a layer of paraffin wax that she had gotten from her realm of nightmares, the basement. It was something special. Claire leaned in a little further. And suddenly she retreated with a shriek as if she had been stung by an adder. Two big yellow eyes were looking right at her out of the darkness. "Hiya, Claire!" Just when the child had thought that it probably just was a cat or another animal stuck in the sewer, a voice began to speak to her. A head appeared in the stormdrain, the head of a clown. Although he lacked the typical white facepaint of one (revealing his dark complexion), Claire recognized his profession instantly. His lips were bright red, with two sweeping lines of the same colour going up to and over his accented eyebrows. He wore white eyeshadow, trying to keep at least a bit of the clowns' base colour intact. Tufts of red hair, sticking out into all directions, framed his face, which gave him a wild and funny appearance at the same time. "Aren't you gonna say Hello?" This was the moment Claire's basic instincts began to act up and she shook her head vehemently. The clown pouted, feigning hurt. "Oh, come on, lassy, don't you want a balloon?" He suddenly conjured up a red balloon out of thin air and let it float beside him. Claire's hand began reaching out to it, but pulled it back at the last moment. "I'm not supposed to take stuff from strangers. Daddy told me that.", she muttered. White teeth flashed in the creature's mouth as he explained: "Your daddy is very wise, very wise indeed. I, Claire, am Mr. Barron, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. And you are Claire. So now we're no longer strangers. Correct?" The young Densmore chuckled. This Pennywise man was amusing to her. If they had met properly, she was sure she would call him a friend by now. But he was in the sewers and she had a nagging feeling that she needed to go home, so she told him: "I guess so. I have to go now, so..." "Go?!", Pennywise interrupted her, his voice suddenly tinged with a cold and aggressive tone for a moment. "Without this?", he asked as friendly as ever and now held her boat between his gloved fingers, waving it before Claire's face. The little girl squealed with delight. "My boat!" He had found it in the sewers and was returning it to her! "Exactly!", Mr Barron said cheerfully, "Come on, Little Claire, take it." Claire's hand reached for her toy, she was so close that her fingertips almost touched the paper... but she pulled away. Again. She felt her stomach contract painfully. In her mind, she still heard the danger in the clown's voice and her resolve started to waver. On one side, she wanted her boat really badly, so she could tell Jake afterwards how brave the boat had fared against the waves. But on the other hand, she wasn't sure anymore if Mr Barron was a friend... or something else. "Oh, but you want that pretty little toy of yours, don't you, Claire?", the man in the sewers whispered, as if he could see the struggle going on in Claire's blonde head. "Of course you want it. Aren't you curious as to how I got here?" Almost mechanically, the girl's head bobbed up and down. "The storm blew us all away, me and the circus. Can't you smell it, hear it?" And as if by some sort of magic, delicious smells hit Claire's nose and cheerful music filled her ears. It was as if there really was a circus down there. Waiting for her... "There's not just your boat down there, there's cotton candy, all the rides you can think of and tons of surprises! And of course balloons. In any colour and shape you can dream about!", Pennywise's voice reached her through all the new impressions. She heard herself ask: "And tell me, do they float?" It was as if the clown's description of the circus had put her under some sort of trance or spell. "Oh yes. They float. They float, Little Claire... And when you're down here, with me and all the others...", he exclaimed, again a strange sound in his voice that Claire couldn't quite place, but which screamed danger and madness. But her hand drew closer and closer to her boat, so close now. There... she had it! What happened next was nothing short of terrifying... As soon as Claire's little fingers had closed around the boat, Mr Barron aka Pennywise suddenly grabbed her arm and held it in a vice like grip. "YOU'LL. FLOAT. TOO!", he shouted. Claire began to scream, feeling sharp nails digging into her tender skin. With tears stinging in her blue eyes, she looked at the clown and what she saw, drove her insane in one single second. The clown's face - she was doubting that he had ever been one after all! - was morphing into something by far more terrible than her monster from the basement. His yellow eyes were sparkling with bloodlust and a craziness that almost made Claire's little heart stop and when he growled at her, he revealed long razor sharp teeth. Claire tried to arch her body away from the stormdrain, but he pulled sharply and her head connected with the wet cement while her arm disappeared up to the socket in the sewer. Stars danced before her eyes and her tears mixed with the endless stream of water dancing in the curb. Jake's sister was hysterically crying rivers by now, she was shaking on her whole body with horror and anticipation. Even though she was just a child, she knew she would not survive this day. "Everything here floats...", was the last thing she heard from her tormentor, in a deep voice as rotting as the debris and dead leaves down there. A sharp and disgusting ripping noise, searing pain, a shrill and piercing scream and Claire Densmore knew no more. The last thing that reached her ears before losing consciousness forever was the sad cry of a falcon. "The falcon couldn't protect me this time...", she muttered, before her still mouth filled with water. Nevermore in his life would Jack Garlinger forget the sight awaiting him as he ran towards the motionless body on the street, lying in front of a stormdrain. He had been having an early lunch when he had first heard the anguished screams of a child. Knowing that something was clearly wrong, he bolted out of the door into the street to see if he could be of any assistance. Jack mumbled in surprise: "Hey, isn't that the Portman-Densmore kid? What made her scream that loud?" But when he turned the body towards him, he let out a piercing cry himself. Claire's left arm was missing from the shoulder downward. It looked as if something had torn it right off. Blood was gushing out of the wound like a fountain and a fragment of bone peeked out, glinting like a morbid kind of pearl. It seemed like a miracle to Garlinger how he managed to not empty his stomach on site. Instead he picked the dead child up, carried her to his house and wrapped her in a blanket. He knew what was coming next. It was Jake who opened the door to Mr Garlinger. The man had tears in his eyes, a look of compassion and sorrow etched on his face. In his arms, he carried a bundle. "What hap-...", he managed to say before the realization and the shock of the scene before him hit him like a blow of arctic wind. He was carrying Claire and she was dead. Jake saw her little face, waxy and of an ashen colour, the expressionless cornflower-blue eyes, devoid of the brilliant light that once filled them. Without touching her, he knew that her skin would be ice cold under his fingers. A lump grew in his throat and he could feel his knees starting to give way under him. "Mum!", he managed to yell before sliding down the wall and going into shock. He felt like he had just been sliced open by a velociraptor. Whatever happened next, he only experienced it through a thick mist. He barely registered his mother shrieking as she saw the body of her daughter, then hyperventilating so hard that Mr Garlinger called the hospital. Barely heard the sirens of the little ambulance transporting all three of them or the loud sobs of his father as he arrived at the clinic. Days passed with the boy feeling like a robot. He was doing the necessary things to survive, but emotionally he felt himself shutting down, staring at the wall of his room through a haze, no longer caring about wiping the tears escaping his eyes. Jake began to thaw a bit when the day of his beloved little sister's burial came around. There he truly felt the compassionate hugs he received from the visitors, heard the chants that would grant his beloved Little Claire's soul a safe passage to Heaven and the tears he wept on this day were strangely cathartic. Two things changed that day: His childish stutter returned worse than ever before and he swore he would one day find the bastard that had torn his family apart. Little did everybody know that Claire's murder was only the beginning... **THE END**

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 **Ok, let me know in the comments if this is worth continuing or too mad... I wish you a good day or night and watch out for sewers and check your bathroom sinks.**

 **Yuna**


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